During the last year, talking with some colleages about firewalls and operative systems the mayor part of then said that they’re using, Pfsense instead M0n0wall. Recently I get a new job and my home networks are in the same range that the work network and some clients. To avoid this situation I decided migrate my router from M0n0wall to Pfsense and thats are the steps:

I decided maintain a copy of the actual M0n0wall config, bougth a new compact flash was the quick option.

Download pfSense

First I downloaded the version for my router, in this case it’s and ALIX Board without VGA,, that means that i need to choose the nanobsd version and my compactFlash size is 4Gb, if I had a bigger campactFlash I just only need to take the 4gb versión.

wget
wget

wget

Verify downloaded image:

md5sum pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz

and check if output it’s the same that content in /pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz.md5

sha256sum pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz

and check if output it’s the same that content in /pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz.sha256

Dump pfSense into the compact flash

In my case as fedora user i need to detect what device file is linked to my compactFlash i make this

Sometimes pocket money isn’t enought for buy new network devices or we want to save some money changuing no existant money for personal time. In my case I needed to create a wireless bridge in my personal network, pass a ethernet wire between two builds wasn’t an option. Searching in my forgoten stuff boxes i found two foneras model 2100. Fon’s firmware isn’t powerfull enought to get wds and when these things happens Free Software is our solution. I’m a lucky man and I also found a usb to 3,3V serial adapter, one of my superpower is that i can brick everything. First of all we need to plug our serial adapter into fonera’s port, check the attached image for see jtag pinouts

when we have our jtag port connected we need a software for send data over jtag in my case i use GtkTerm.

in debian is simply I open a root terminal and I write

apt-get install GtkTerm

in the same term i write

gtkterm

I use a root terminal because I don’t want waste time configuring /dev/ttSy* permissions

next step is configure port speed 9600,8N1

in GtkTerm menu select configuration/port and fill data boxes, in my case port is /dev/ttyUSB0 if you don’t know your port a dmesg output can be helpul.

now is time to plug powersounce on our fonera and see output.

must be something like this in our gtkterm

we need get access to redboot console you only need un plug and plug powersource to fonera and press continously ctrl+c until you see